Updates

Over the weekend Telecommunications got calls from our TV viewers that the channels were not working. Monday morning a couple of staff members went up to our Crown Mtn tower and the winds had blown the huge microwave dishes ajar. Staff climbed the tower and adjusted the dishes in the ongoing wind. They also traveled to the Williams tower and yesterday made it up to the Sunlight tower which still has 4 feet of snow around the tower and a good ways down the primitive road getting up there. The Sunlight tower visit was exceptional because staff had been monitoring the wind before they went up there and The National Weather Service had clocked a 186 mph gust up there! That is a category 4 Hurricane strength wind! Unfortunately the wind didn’t calm down much after they got up there and they were climbing the tower with 50mph gusts. They managed to get the work done but today they were feeling a bit frazzled. Continued monitoring and trips are planned for the coming days.

Due to high winds day after day in the area the microwave dishes and antennas on the Pitkin County towers have been blown ajar and need to be adjusted back into place. Staff are in the field trying to correct problems at Crown, Williams and Sunlight towers. These fixes may only last as long as the next big blast of wind. The staff will continue to stay after it but there may be TV or Radio outages until the winds calm down.

4/26: The transmitter for television channel 4s is off the air at the source in Grand Junction. The broadcaster has not provided an estimated time to restore the signal. Once they fix things on their end, the broadcast feed will resume in the Pitkin County system. Thank you to all who notified us of this outage.

Staff fixed the Microwave Back Haul Problem Thursday night around 7:30pm

The microwave back haul that supports our entire systems for FM Radio, TV, Broadband and Public Safety Radio has gone down at our Willams Tower. We believe that the high winds the past few days has caused these problems. Staff are on their way to Williams now and hope to have the problem solved soon. No time frame is available for this event.

The 3’s now include the “Story” channel on 3-7. Viewers may need to rescan their television to receive the new channel, or to bring the 3’s back on their device all together.

Tech Talk: Over the air TV broadcasts contain more than just video and audio. They include metadata such as channel tables and instructions for your TV on how to decode and display the signals it receives. The addition of the new 3’s channel changed the transport stream data table which may make some TVs not receive some or all of the 3’s until a rescan is performed to download the new channel data table.